Assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to do
things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to
do. An obvious and ubiquitous example is a wheelchair, which assists
with mobility. Many examples of assistive technologies involve
providing universal access, such as modifications to televisions or
telephones to make them accessible to those with vision or hearing
impairments. An important sub-discipline within the AT research
community is known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication
(AAC), which is focused on communication technologies for those with
impairments that interfere with some human communication modality,
such as spoken or written communication.

From providing access to the web for individuals with severe motor
impairments, to improving the intelligibility of speech spoken by
individuals with speech impairments, the range of topics in Assistive
Technology (AT) and Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC)
that make use of (or could make use of) speech and natural language
processing (NLP) technologies is very large. Yet the number of
individuals actively working within the two research communities
– AT/AAC on the one hand and speech/NLP on the other – is
relatively small. This workshop will build on two previous workshops
(the first co-located with
NAACL-HLT 2010 in Los Angeles and the second with EMNLP
2011 in Edinburgh), bringing together individuals from both research
communities and the individuals they are working to assist.